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REthink stress and behavior
About the method
What is Mondo?
Mondo is a fresh, deeply human way of rethinking stress and behavior—and learning what to do with that understanding.
We spend so much time trying to understand ourselves and others, yet stress and behavior still often leave us feeling stuck or frustrated. Mondo helps explain why—and what we can do about it—using science and real-world strategies.
How does it work?
Mondo brings together research from across disciplines to explain what is happening during stress and challenging behavior—and why. From exploring the brain’s response to stress, to understanding how neurochemistry and reinforcement shape behavioral patterns, to examining the evolutionary roots of our reactions, Mondo turns complex science into a framework that is simple, accessible, and practical.
The framework follows three steps: Know, See, Do.
KNOW — Understand the science.
Mondo starts by making the science of stress and behavior easy to understand. Participants learn how the brain and body respond to safety and threat, why those responses change the behaviors available to us, and how our histories, environments, and experiences influence what happens in the moment.
SEE — Recognize it in real life.
Understanding the science changes what we notice. Mondo provides tools for recognizing patterns, identifying the safety and threat cues shaping a situation, and making sense of behaviors that might otherwise seem confusing, frustrating, or irrational.
DO — Find what actually helps.
Mondo translates that understanding into practical strategies across five areas derived from Dr. Yunes-Koch's PhD research: Connection, Support, Senses, Playfulness, and Cognition. Participants learn the science behind why these approaches can influence stress and behavior, then personalize them to fit their own preferences, personalities, relationships, and contexts.
Mondo recognizes and centers the idea that there is no single strategy that works for everyone or every team. The goal is to understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what might help—then find solutions that make sense for the actual people and circumstances involved.
Where did Mondo come from?
The method itself was first developed during Dr. Alexa Yunes-Koch’s Phd program, where she created the Autonomic Safety and Neural Integration (ASNI) framework for her dissertation on teacher stress and student behavior. Formerly known as STRESSED, the method was created to help people navigate stressful situations and change behaviors. Alexa and Claudia Yunes developed the strategies for Mondo together, drawing largely from Claudia’s 30 years of expertise working with children and adults. Claudia had tremendous success transforming learning and work environments throughout her career, and Alexa devoted her time in graduate school to figuring out the scientific reasons for that exceptional success within stressful situations.
How is Mondo different?
Mondo is not primarily self-help. You don't have to be unhappy with yourself to find it useful.
It is not primarily nervous-system content. Autonomic state matters enormously, but it isn't the explanation for every behavior.
It is not primarily neuroscience education. The science serves understanding, not the other way around.
It is not primarily behavior change. Sometimes the most interesting question is why something is already working beautifully.
And it is not a collection of neuroscience-backed tricks.
Mondo's distinctive territory is connecting the dots:
- between physiology and behavior,
- between ourselves and others,
- between environment and experiences,
- between what happens now and what the brain learns for next time,
- between scientific findings that belong to different academic fields but all play a role in the same moment.
Dr. Alexa Yunes-Koch
Speaker | Creator of Mondo Method
Dr. Alexa Yunes-Koch is the founder and creator of Mondo Method, and co-owner of parent company Yunes Educational Services. She earned a PhD in Education with an emphasis in behavioral neurobiology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research focused on the neuroscience of stress, teacher-student interactions, learning and motivation, trauma, and emotional regulation. Alexa has over 10 years of teaching experience ranging from the PreK-12 context to the graduate level, and has presented nationally and internationally in Texas, Michigan, Wyoming, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, Illinois, and New York, as well as Mexico, Scotland, and China.
As a stress and behavior specialist, Alexa has worked with teachers, students, parents, and professionals around the world to provide practical strategies and resources to manage stress and change behavior. Alexa's workshops and strategies are all about transforming environments to be enjoyable within challenging contexts through neuroscience-based strategies that humanize and support all team members.
Alexa has collaborated with the Walt Disney Company to create socioemotional learning activities featuring Mondo Method, and the method is now being used across school districts and organizations to improve and optimize learning, living, and work environments for adults and children alike.
How does it compare to other popular WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING A
CBT (Cognitive behavioral therapy)
CBT shares a lot of the same principles as Mondo. The behavioral activation and cognitive restricting from CBT align with everything Mondo highlights. However, Mondo is different in a few key ways. First, Mondo proposes that we can’t change behaviors without understanding the brain and it’s physiological stress response. Second, Mondo places a strong emphasis on the bidirectional exchanges that cause behavior patterns between individuals. And third, Mondo highlights the importance of understanding the chemical reinforcement and evolutionary purpose of different behaviors.
The main issue with CBT is that it often requires individuals to think rationally about their behaviors, which as the science synthesized in Mondo Method explains, is very difficult to do since the rational part of the brain isn't always fully accessible when we are dysregulated. For example, in the middle of an argument with a co-worker or when a child is throwing a tantrum, asking them/us to think about how and why we are behaving that way is not helpful. Mondo gives us tools to talk directly to the subcortical parts of the brain and to the body in those moments through five different types of strategies, so that we can get that rational part of the brain fully back online.
ABA (Applied behavior analysis)
While both Mondo Method and ABA focus on finding patterns of behavior, the key distinction is in what happens once that pattern is identified. Mondo is all about humanizing, individualizing, and personalizing intervention strategies to ensure that each child or adult is feeling seen, heard, and valued. Additionally, Mondo focuses strongly on identifying the root cause of a behavior, and seeking connection and playfulness to address underlying issues. ABA, on the other hand, tends to prioritize compliance, and focuses on reducing undesired behaviors rather than understanding them. ABA also prioritizes gathering and analyzing data, while Mondo prioritizes the quality of experience for people involved.
We focus on building connection and making sure people feel safe, valued, happy, fulfilled, and able to communicate their needs and wants in constructive ways. We also focus on the idea that we should tailor and individualize regulation strategies, so nobody is being forced to do things they don’t want to be doing or treated like a problem to be fixed.
PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports)
PBIS can align well with Mondo in many ways, but there are a few big differences. We focus a lot on the connection between teacher well-being and student behavior rather than just improving student behavior. We also emphasize the importance of understanding the root cause of a behavior instead of just wanting to erase negative behaviors without understanding them first. Another big difference is that for more severe behavior challenges, PBIS often requires external or third-party support, while Mondo Method gives teachers and parents more strategies to connect with those kids and build playful, trusting relationships to then see the changes they want to see. We try to avoid making kids feel like problems to be fixed, or like they are “different” or “broken,” which can happen when kids are bouncing around from specialist to specialist, intervention to intervention. So, we focus on humanizing, understanding the biological cause of behaviors, and creating personalized strategies that kids enjoy and want to be doing, without having to be removed from their classroom, home, etc.
Team Building, Feedback Systems, Performance Reviews, and Other Organizational Initiatives
The purpose of these types of organizational initiatives is to improve productivity and outcomes, but they more often than not end up having the opposite impact. When we ask team members to fill out pages and pages of paperwork, give up their work time to participate in forced socialization without meaningfully engaged leadership, or roll out an initiative without understanding its impact on the day-to-day work of our team members, we are bound to see a decrease in morale and a diminution of loyalty, innovation, and productivity. In order for team members to work well together, be creative, innovate, take risks, and speak openly about their concerns or ideas, they have to feel a biological sense of safety. Otherwise, the parts of the brain responsible for those positive qualities are highjacked by the survival parts of the brain and reinforced by neuromodulators, making it harder and harder to transform an organization’s culture. Mondo’s strategies for organizations are largely about injecting moments of reprieve in the midst of stressful situations, trusting employees and team members to know what is best as long as they are meeting their goals, helping each other and growing together, humanizing each other and making each team member feel seen and valued for their unique strengths, and gaining physiological strategies for co-regulating during stressful situations. Each organization working with Mondo generates different strategies to fit their unique context, all grounded in the same science and framework.